Sergio Amadeu da Silveira - Cidadania e Redes Digitais

eng
c i t i z e n s h i p a n d d i g i t a l n e t w o r k s
class plans, didactic books, games, software and other materials that aid in teaching
and learning. They contribute to make education more accessible, especially where
money for learning materials is scarce. These resources also encourage one type of
participative culture in learning, creation, sharing and cooperation that the knowledge
societies in rapid transformation need.”
Thus, the OER are a fundamental instrument to strengthen an outline of Open
Education inspired in “technologies that facilitate collaborative and flexible learning,
as well as in the sharing of open teaching practices that allow the educators to
benefit from the best ideas of their peers. In addition to also being increased in order
to include new approaches of assessment, certification and collaborative learning”
(Cape Town Open Education Declaration).
There are, for many years, projects that produce and use open educational resources,
in Brazil and throughout the world. All these projects have the three forming
elements above — content, software-platform, and open licenses — but differ
as to their proposals. For instance, the Connexions platform, accessible in the www.
cnx.org, is a location to see and share educational materials. In the Connexions, the
resources are treated as small pieces of knowledge called “modules” or “legos” that
may be organized in courses, books, reports etc., being that any person can read
and contribute. The Connexions promotes the communication among the content
creators and offers various forms of collaboration for review, for the content edition
and updating by peers.
Another international and known project is the OpenCourseWare, a free and open
publication of high quality digital educational material, organized in courses. Not only
class grades are available, but also, many times, the methodologies of use of the materials
in the classroom. The OpenCourseWare Consortium is a collaboration of over
200 higher education institutions and associated organizations of the whole world,
with the purpose of creating and making available a broad and deep group of open
educational contents through a shared and collaborative model. The mission of the
OpenCourseWare Consortium is to promote education and capacitate people of the
whole world through such resources. Institutions such as the MIT, University of California,
both from the USA, and many others from the whole world, are part of it 11 .
Another interesting and recent project is the “Peer to Peer University” (P2PU),
11. For a complete list of the members, see: http://www.ocwconsortium.org/members/consortiummembers.html.
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